Digital communications frequently employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) signals in which the passband response is reduced at carrier frequency. Excluding from consideration a pilot carrier added to the VSB suppressed-carrier-AM digital television (DTV) signals transmitted in accordance with the 1995 standard for digital television broadcasting established by the Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC), the radio-frequency spectrum of the VSB DTV signals exhibits 3 dB roll-off at a carrier frequency 310 khz from the lower frequency bound of the six-megahertz-wide television channels. A problem with VSB signals with roll-off through carrier frequency is that the asymmetry of the modulation sidebands introduces jitter into carrier tracking that is done using variants of the well-known Costas loop. In some digital communications systems the transmitter employs filtering to eliminate modulation sideband energy in the vicinity of the carrier frequency. The ATSC standard does not specifically provide for eliminating modulation sideband energy near the carrier frequency. Instead, a pilot carrier of substantial strength is inserted into the VSB suppressed-carrier-AM DTV signals to reduce the carrier jitter caused by modulation sideband energy near the carrier frequency.
The transient response of synchronous demodulation of VSB signals is notoriously dependent on the roll-off of frequency response through the carrier region in the final I-F signal being synchronously demodulated.
A type of radio receiver design that is employed in digital television sets employs a six-megahertz-wide final intermediate-frequency signal that is offset from zero-frequency by no more than a few megaHertz. This VSB final I-F signal is digitized, converted to a complex digital final I-F signal, and then synchrodyned to baseband using a digital complex multiplier. The digital complex multiplier multiplies the complex digital final I-F signal by a complex digital carrier to recover in-phase and quadrature-phase baseband results of the synchrodyne carried out in the digital regime. The in-phase baseband results are used as symbol code input by the symbol decoder of the DTV receiver. The quadrature-phase baseband results are lowpass filtered, and the lowpass filter response is used to control the frequency and phase of local oscillations used in the down conversion to final I-F signal, implementing a procedure known as bandpass tracking. This type of receiver is more fully described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,449 issued 26 Dec. 1996 to C. B. Patel and A. L. R. Limberg, entitled “DIGITAL VSB DETECTOR WITH BANDPASS PHASE TRACKER, AS FOR INCLUSION IN AN HDTV RECEIVER”, and assigned to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,449 describes the carrier of the final I-F signal being below an upper sideband that is synchronously detected in the digital regime to recover baseband symbol code. Such final I-F signal is the result of a downconversion in which a very-high-frequency (VHF) intermediate-frequency signal is heterodyned with local oscillations of a VHF frequency below the VHF I-F signal frequency band. A final I-F signal with the carrier of above a lower sideband is the result of a downconversion in which a very-high-frequency (VHF) intermediate-frequency signal is heterodyned with local oscillations of a VHF frequency above the VHF I-F signal frequency band. This is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,659,372 issued 19 Aug. 1997 to C. B. Patel and A. L. R. Limberg, entitled “DIGITAL TV DETECTOR RESPONDING TO FINAL-IF SIGNAL WITH VESTIGIAL SIDEBAND BELOW FULL SIDEBAND IN FREQUENCY”, and assigned to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. U.S. Pat. No. 5,659,372 describes the final I-F signal with the carrier above a lower sideband being synchrodyned to baseband in the digital regime to recover baseband symbol code.